Today marks an entire week of using Haiku as my primary operating system. This
is my first PC to get the most out of any BeOS related operating system to date.
My old 200MHz Toshiba ran R5 PE just fine but without any networking. My
eMachine ran Zeta just fine, but once again, there were networking issues (and
Zeta was pronounced dead around this time). In the age of the Internet, this
pretty much forced me away from BeOS and its decendants until now.

I spend much of my time in a terminal, so the browser issue isn't such a big deal for me either. As long as I can get to OSnews!

Regarding the unsecured wifi.. if I locked down my router to only allow my Haiku machines MAC address, would that work? Would give a small amount of security at least. How about hiding the SSID also?

Hiding the SSID won't help because the experimental wifi stack doesn't allow you to specify one yet (it just searches for the strongest unsecured network it can find).

As for MAC filtering - that would probably keep the majority of people from utilizing your connection, but keep in mind it 1) doesn't encrypt your traffic (so always make sure to use https and ssh for remote connections you want secured) and 2) can be thwarted by cloning the MAC on another machine (this would require someone to be snooping traffic to determine which MACs are in the area, and cloning them until they find one that seems to work).